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VirtualBox 3.0 Beta Brings SMP, OpenGL 2.0

Phoronix: VirtualBox 3.0 Beta Brings SMP, OpenGL 2.0

Sun Microsystems has announced the first beta release of VirtualBox 3.0 Beta 1. The major additions to VirtualBox 3.0 so far is guest SMP (Symmetric Multi-Processing) support for up to 32 virtual CPUs, Windows guests now support Direct3D 8/9 applications and games, and there is now OpenGL 2.0 support for Windows, Linux, and Solaris guests.Guest SMP support has been a feature that's long been lacking from VirtualBox to provide better multi-core support, but it's finally arrived! To use the guest SMP support in VirtualBox, a processor with VT-x or AMD-V is required...

For gaming I recommend Wine over VirtualBox. Sure there are things which could work better on VirtualBox (things like .NET if games use that or perhaps copy protections). Performance will be much lower compared to our wined3d code. The reason lies in the opengl implementation. Moving all opengl calls from virtualbox to the native opengl driver isn't efficient but virtualbox also needs to cache all data, so that after a 'pause' in virtualbox the program can continue as it was. Further some opengl calls which wined3d must make a lot (state switches like glEnable/glDisable calls) are not very great for virtualbox opengl as it requires resyncing which is relative slow.

Compared to Wine performance will be lower but I have no idea how it will compare against Parallels and Vmware. I think it will be faster than Vmware because Vmware uses Microsoft DirectX including the microsoft device driver model and that might not be efficient performance wise. Not sure what parallels does these days, years ago they used wined3d.

Is Guest OS's OpenGL support some sort of paravirtualization or what kind of system, does Virtualbox just passthru OpenGL commands to host OS OpenGL driver? Meaning how much penalty there is? Educated guesses?

Its much easier to work games under Virtualbox rather than Wine, regarding because all sorts of .net launchers, game updaters, etc.

I hope someone could benchmark differences between native, wine and virtualbox OpenGL and D3D performance...